Dear Editor
DEAR EDITOR INDONESIA I thoroughly enjoyed the article on Indonesia by your new contributor, Donald Kirk ("Indonesia's Fragmented Revolution," NL, March 14). In contrast to the recent...
...It has been adopted, in various modifications, by a large number of countries, and normally works well...
...It not only was informative but a pleasure to read...
...they don't like that myth stuff any better than he does...
...The other, proportional representation, was intended to repair defects in the older system...
...There are essentially two democratic traditions in the world today...
...Dobbs Ferry, N. Y. Arnold C. Brackman 'REAPPRAISALS5 Whatever Raymond Rosenthal's motives ("Lover's Quarrel With America," NL, February 28), in his idiosyncratic praise for Martin Green's Reappraisals, neither his words nor his lengthy quotations tell us much about Green or the book...
...In the past, The New Leader has been among the few journals to take note of their plight...
...One gnawing question: Is Rosenthal American...
...Green's myth is that the readers isolated in their cloisters are somehow at the same time united in a dangerous conspiracy (their wilful misreading of Faulkner, for example, spreads "an intellectual disease...
...This humble but satisfying kind of realism, with no portentous meanings attached, is an art experience we go to Hollywood for...
...Period...
...But this is not the only self-contradiction...
...This does not alter the substance of my argument in the essay but it would alter the accidents of tone and treatment, allusion, comparison, commentary, quite importantly: and I take it that all those are included in opinion...
...I would now want to call Whitman not an important poet, but a great one...
...Food consists of rice and either tempe or tahu [bean curd cakes...
...however, the book, as criticism, as an expression of preference, is all wrong about America, both its literature and life...
...In contrast to the recent outpouring of material by some American academicians, with a view to whitewashing Sukarno and the PKI in the September 30 affair...
...Far from stressing the sordid and hasty in their descriptions," Green writes, "Salinger avoids them, Nabokov transforms them...
...A new breeze is blowing in Indonesia and has for some months, but it will not be a fresh one until these men, who played vital roles in the course of the genuine Indonesian Revolution against tyranny, 194549, are released...
...they are permitted no reading matter whatsoever...
...New York City Richard Kostelanetz No, Rosenthal is a native of Brooklyn.-Ed...
...Efforts are being made to have the prisoners removed from Jakarta to the nearby hill station of Bandung...
...But compare the above passage with Green's introduction: "The only case in which there has been any change in the substance of my opinion is the Whitman essay...
...No wonder Partisan Review and Commentary turned down Green's essay on Salinger...
...there are no lights permitted after dusk...
...Green thus makes American scholars and critics debilitated, diseased, and engaged in a "collective suicide of the literary mind," on the one hand, and, simultaneously, a dangerous, entrenched establishment, on the other...
...One of them, based on single member constituencies, is essentially an Anglo-Saxon tradition with its roots in Germanic tribal customs...
...It reads, in part, as follows: "Although they are now out of danger from the Bung's [Sukarno's] Madiun chums, that's the only perceptible improvement for the men themselves...
...Kirk provides hard-hitting insight into the mephitic Indonesian picture...
...His taste and critical equipment complement each other...
...Similarly, his remark that Catcher in the Rye successfully renders "a whole city" is untenable...
...The type of election used in Switzerland, Scandinavia, and, indeed, most democracies in Europe was originally developed in the latter part of the 19th century by liberal political groups in Western Europe...
...it is the picturesque and pretty they emphasize...
...I know little about Israel's politics, and cannot comment on the merits of Ben Gurion's proposals, but the implication that the Israeli "proportional representation" is somehow Eastern European is unfair...
...Salinger (a Green hero) makes practically no use of irony, ambiguity, myth, symbol, or levels of meaning...
...Rosenthal says that "there is a patronizing tone to all our criticism...
...Green refers, surely, to the pretty homosexual teacher in Salinger's novel and the picturesque neon signs and motels in Lolita...
...for Green rarely moves beyond dealing with plots, values and the quality of characterization...
...Associate Professor University of Virginia...
...Even if Green thinks Faulkner's high reputation "a sinister phenomenon," it is nearly vulgar to dub him "only a minor talent who produced quite major engines of mental torture, crucifixions of literary sensibility...
...Reappraisals achieves a dogged consistency that might be acceptable in graduate school...
...Some have been held political prisoner for nine years...
...This is literary politics, not criticism...
...Green's thesis about American writing is, I believe, fallacious, and some of his comments undermine his case, more or less conclusively...
...Salinger, according to Green, is the great author who has been ignored by the Establishment...
...If one had inklings that Green suffers from deficiencies of taste, few passages could be so confirming as the following: "It can be merely the view of a four-lane highway in a blank Michigan landscape, and a truck speeding along it on a dull afternoon, and the way it slows down to turn into a gas station, and the array of bright stickers on the office window, and the way the old man hustles out to the pump...
...Finally, after railing against academic myth criticism and transcendental interpretations for most of his book, Green gives us exactly those things in an essay on Salinger: "[Salinger's characters] constitute a myth world . . . they so completely transcend the limits of their individual stories, even of fictional characters...
...Hopefully Green will progress, as he has with Whitman, in his readings of Faulkner, Hawthorne, Melville, and that "charming children's book," Huckleberry Finn...
...As Americans we are accustomed to the single member constituency, but the fact that most of us are unfamiliar with PR does not prove that it is inferior...
...The military police jail in Jakarta, as you no doubt know, is real Devil's Island stuff...
...In round-about fashion I received last week a letter depicting their plight...
...But apply Green's mistaken criticism of James to Salinger and it works: "He makes it seem that aesthetic sensibility, suitably enlarged, will guide you through every moral and intellectual tangle...
...The moment is propitious to focus world attention on them again...
...but the evaluation was reversed...
...For the first few nights they didn't even have mats to sleep on...
...When you take Green's canons seriously, as he himself does not, the arguments cancel themselves out...
...One aspect of the Indonesian situation is being overlooked...
...This is the situation of the Sukarno regime's Democratic Socialist prisoners, including former prime ministers, home ministers, foreign ministers, defence ministers, prominent parliamentarians, and newspapermen...
...It is simply impossible to say, as Green does...
...In Praising Martin Green's Reappraisals, Raymond Rosenthal approvingly quotes Green's intention to "let fresh air into the cloister to douse the poisonous fumes that are emanating therefrom today and spoiling the general atmosphere...
...Richard Chase, who anticipated each of Green's major strictures on Faulkner (as Green's quotes from Chase show) was able to see through the empty gestures to the greatness behind them...
...In other words, "the burden of what he had to say remained unchanged...
...But I am disappointed that Raymond Rosenthal thinks so highly of this book and thinks that "the silence that has clamped down around [Green] and his book is rather frightening...
...they have such delightful chores as cleaning the toilets...
...Green's subtitle is "Commonsense Readings in American Literature" and he is supposed to be against mythic and metaphorical interpretation, but he retails an absurd and hackneyed metaphor of cloisters-from which those he disagrees with issue forth "sinister" readings of American books...
...Gordon Tullock Charlottesville...
...Essentially, the English critic believes that the best literature has the rational obviousness and simplicity of an Emersonian journal-jotting or a heavy-handed satire...
...New York City Peter Shaw Department of English New York State University at Stonybrook BEN GURION I thoroughly enjoyed M. Z. Frank's analysis of "The Ben Gurion Battle" in Israel (NL, February 28...
...But their wives can fetch in supplemental food twice a week (if they can get it), and may visit with them for exactly one hour, once a week...
...Green's defense of Holden Caulfield-that what he "thinks is only part of what he does" -is introduced to answer Green's own reservations about that character...
...Green's book is riddled with contradictions because it is predicated on a conspiracy theory: Since the major critics write always to build up their Establishment, he seems to reason, anything goes in the attack on them...
...But perhaps the worst thing about it, apart from the physical discomfort and the boredom, is that they're thrown in with the common criminals-who now include those accused of murdering the generals...
...This rather incredible statement, so clumsily written, suggests that the English writer's traditional sentimentality toward the energy of American literature is superseded, in Green, by a warm feeling toward all the trivia of the American scene...
...But it is Martin Green who patronizes the American books...
...But the same thing can be said with more relevance about Huckleberry Finn, about whose character Green still has the same kinds of doubts...
...When that changes, everything changes...
...The Israeli version is no more "extreme" than the one used in the Netherlands...
...On November 6 the Army moved them from Madiun, in East lava-famous as the site of the Communist coup of 1948-to Jakarta...
...Things are pretty bad for them...
...This could not happen in literary criticism, because there all response is determined by and towards the evaluation of the individual text...
...In his chapter on Studies in Classic American Literature Green points to a change between Lawrence's first and final drafts and tells us: "The burden of what he had to say about Cooper remained unchanged: but the evaluation was reversed...
...His prejudices lead him to prefer A Connecticut Yankee to Huckleberry Finn, to find Emerson a more satisfactory author than Hawthorne...
...Los Angeles Larry Moskowitz M. Z. Frank's article on Ben Gurion is subtitled, "Westernizing Israel's Electoral System...
...The silly and limiting notion that you can't change your mind is of course necessary if you believe in "commonsense readings"-for if common sense can turn out to be wrong, then someone is going to suggest that we bring in intelligence and wit, and then where would we be but back with Trilling, Kazin and Chase...
...Thus the purpose of Reappraisals, as Rosenthal discerns, is to repudiate the entire school of recent scholarship that emphasizes qualities neither this taste nor critical approach can fathom--myth, Gothic terror, ambiguity, and complexity-as characteristic of the best American literature...
...most, for four years...
...If there is a current problem in literary studies it lies in the profound disagreements among our leading critics (compare Alfred Kazin and Lionel Trilling on Theodore Dreiser, for example), not in their perpetuating "vested interests...
Vol. 49 • March 1966 • No. 7
